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Friday, April 25, 2008

WinPatrol 2008 introduced in its 10th year

According to eWeek.com WinPatrol is one of the 10 Free Must-Have Security Tools. “This ultimate watchdog program monitors Windows computers for signs of malicious hacker activity”. The new WinPatrol 2008 continues to be the Swiss Army Knife of Window utilities with the addition of its ActiveX manager.

It seems like every week more problems are reported in Quicktime, RealPlayer, Adobe Flash, Sun’s Java or other 3rd party controls. Once the vulnerability is known the risk increases exponentially until a patch is available. WinPatrol 2008 takes the worry out of waiting for a patch to become available. When a vulnerability is found Scotty will let you disable or set the “kill-bit” on the appropriate control until a new one is made available.

WinPatrol 2008 will also monitor your system and let you know when new ActiveX components try to make their home on your system. If it’s not something you wanted WinPatrol will kill the new component before it can do any damage.

Thanks to feedback from everyone who helped test WinPatrol 2008 including our volunteers who localize WinPatrol for our friends around the world. Thank you as well to staff at ars technica for including WinPatrol in their article "Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows" While this article implies WinPatrol is the equivalent of (User Account Control(UAC) for Windows XP it’s still a nice mention.